


No, *You're* a Miserable Little Pile of Secrets

by The_Exile



Category: Original Work
Genre: Addiction, Alchemy, Alliances, Asexual Character, Banter, Drinking, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Mild Language, Monster horror, Succubus, discussion of sex, life energy draining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24590020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Claire is a retired asexual monster hunter who specialised in not being seduced by succubi and incubi. A combination of getting too old, a dangerous alchemical potion addiction and an increasing sympathy with the enemy drove her out of work. Annie is a succubus who, through repeated battles with Claire, became fascinated by non-sexual ways that humans become passionate and inspired by life, producing the sort of energy she can feed off. If its non-lethal, all the better - it means she ends up with more in the long run. They still sometimes meet for a drink or two in the bar.
Relationships: (A & X) Monster Hunter on Retirement & Their Monster Nemesis (OWNH)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	No, *You're* a Miserable Little Pile of Secrets

"For someone who doesn't see the point in booze," commented the woman opposite her at the table, rolling her eyes, "You sure drink like a fish."

"This stuff doesn't affect me, to be honest," she drawled, looking elegantly bored as she perused her whisky glass, pursing her lips.

"You have expensive tastes in things that don't work on you."

She shrugged, "I still like the taste and the smell. And the community spirit."

"Suit yourself, the stuff tastes like paint thinner to me."

"Don't drink paint thinner, Claire."

Claire sighed, "Annie, I have an alchemy habit that I've almost kicked, I swear. I don't just ingest random substances."

"I was just checking," she drained her whisky and stared at the empty glass, "Some paint thinner has alcahest in it, see. They don't advertise it properly because they don't actually know what alcahest is..."

"I don't imply you need pulling past every advertisement in a phone box for a lady of the night," said Claire, "So leave me alone about my issues."

"Seriously, though, you do know that alcohol doesn't really do your mood any good, right?" asked Annie, "I'm looking at your life energy right now and its gone much shallower. A lot more spread out, and that's why it feels like there's more, but overall there's less, and its kind of leaking..."

"Paws off my life energy."

"You just said you weren't gonna assume I can't control myself."

"And then you wouldn't shut up about my drinking," said Claire, "When you're also drinking."

"I just wanna know why humans drink so much," she said, "You know it also makes you worse at..."

"Yeah, we know," she sighed. 

It'd been twenty years now and Annie was still like this. She was aware that Immortals by definition lived an unimaginably long time, enough to make them think very differently to Mortals about a lot of things, part of which was that any kind of change or learning came so slowly that it sometimes felt nonexistent. Succubi, in particular, looked permanently young, both because they had to maintain their appearance in order to hunt and because they were always feeding on life energy. Their metabolism had to be pretty terrible, thought Claire, like sunfish. She just really hadn't expected a Succubus to be so... child-like, sometimes. That said, she was actually quite young for an Immortal, still more or less within the scope that a human could easily understand. She had no concept of a child or what it meant to grow from one, something that Immortals didn't do, so calling her immature didn't mean much to her.

"It helps with the pain, though," said Claire.

"Something hurts?" Annie raised her eyes and looked at her human companion. There was genuine concern in her eyes, a cerulean blue that shone slightly in a way that human eyes didn't, with pupils that were more feline and still incredibly beguiling. 

To someone that way inclined, Claire mused, it was probably supposed to be sexy. 

Seduction didn't work on Claire. Sure, she could see how beautiful Annie was in a very fully developed way that didn't match her personality sometimes. At times she could even become fixed by that deep blue gaze of hers, enthralled by the languid way she blinked, the fluidity of her movement. Had the Succubus been the sort of predator who froze you in place and then bit you with venomous fangs or something, Claire wouldn't have that much of an advantage over anyone else. When it cames to actual sexual desire, though, Claire just didn't have any. Annie was just pretty; Claire didn't want to do anything about it, per se. Without any of the feelings around it, the whole idea of sex just sounded like a messy, exhausting, uncomfortably hot biological process that came with a bunch of risks to your health. When she knew that her enemy was going to use it against her to drain her life energy, she was about as tempted to have sex with Succubi as she was to let a snake bite her to see what happened. Even if said demon managed to catch her in the middle of a wet dream, they were so mechanical, they contained about as much of the energy that Succubi craved, she might as well have been dreaming about stretching to get rid of the crick in her neck. 

This was supposed to make her some sort of innate expert in fighting them, a perfect counter-weapon. The Order had given her every mission to fight a Succubus or Incubus that ever came up. Not only was it getting tedious and not at all what she'd signed up for, if they actually understood how such demons fed, they'd realise it didn't even work like that.

The main problem was, a Succubus or Incubus (as far as she could tell, they were the same creatures, just changing targets) fed off the intense emotional and creative energy that was released by sexual passion. The source didn't have to be sex - it could be music and dance, artistic inspiration, even, embarrassingly, intense religious experiences. Trained to recognise the signs specifically, Claire had come to realise that the way she felt after, say, finishing a chapter of a novel satisfactorily, the absolute exhaustion and the gnawing fear that she'd spent herself entirely and would never reach such an apex again, the physical pain beyond tension aches, the feeling that she'd lost control somewhere along the way and the worry that it hadn't really been her, that it hadn't counted - was one of her targets feeding off her. They had taken another route, approached it from another angle, and the damage they'd done was still as dangerous.

Of course, the freaking incompetent bureaucrats at the Order hadn't given her any help when she'd requested it. She was supposed to be immune. If she hadn't lost that perceived advantage, they couldn't do anything. It didn't tick the right boxes, couldn't be accounted for on the payroll.

Come to think of it, that was probably when she’d started sympathising with the bloody demons – the trait that had almost gotten her excommunicated, possibly even hunted as a heretic, had she not promised to use her contacts only to obtain allies who had been proven not to be dangerous, in a fight against those demons who were very much dangerous. It had taken a lot of persuasion, years of uncertainty whether either of them would live or die, whole forests of paperwork to clear it with the higher-ups. Even then, she was constantly monitored, even now she’d quit, way too old these days to be swinging silver weapons around and throwing holy water. There was only so much you could augment yourself with alchemy and she was mildly allergic to holy magic. She was taking enough random potions every day that it was becoming more dangerous than the things she fought. She was badly hooked on about five different potions, three of which weren’t the sort you could get through the legitimate, sanctioned channels. Her first near-lethal overdose on something that was ten per cent likely to turn you into a werewolf if you died to it, was around the time she seriously decided to quit.

There was irony in the way her strategies for fighting the demons, who were learning new ways to get past every defence almost as fast as she thought them up in the first place, had begun to change the relationship she had with them. She’d taught them that it didn’t have to be sex, then she’d taught them that it didn’t even need to be one person – in fact, with enough collective energy being produced, more than the sum of its parts, they could get the amount they needed without draining someone to death, without anyone even noticing the loss if they spread out their feeding grounds and were more careful in keeping track of what they took. With enough time monitoring humans, how they did things, they could even feed more energy into the crowd, just by inspiring people, by stoking up the flames of a crowd’s enthusiasm, even if the demons themselves didn’t really feel or even understand what everyone was being excited about. Claire had led Succubi and Incubi (it didn’t really matter which one when she didn’t care about either of them in that way) into rock concerts, protest marches, gaming conventions, once to this amusement arcade at peak hours that Annie seemed to enjoy – she was supernaturally good at pinball. Each time, the demon had managed to pinpoint her in the crowd and aim a precise enough energy drain directed solely at her that it could kill her. However, in learning how to do all this, they inevitably became too fascinated by the realisation that they had new ways of feeding, of fulfilling a constant urge that was limiting them almost as much as it did their would-be prey, that they lost interest in a lone, annoying demon hunter.

Then she’d met Annie, who had been watching her, reading up on the reports of all her exploits that apparently made her notorious in demon society. After a brief abortive attempt to seduce her, she’d announced her intention to become the first Succubus to make a real human friend.

That had been twenty years ago now. It had led them here, to this badly lit, run-down bar where they at least weren’t bothered, what with the place having barely any other customers most of the time. The oddball Succubus who hadn’t fed the traditional way for a year now and the retired demon hunter watched by about five separate secret government organisations in case she finally flipped out and turned entirely to the dark side. Not that, as far as she could tell from Annie’s description of her daily life, there was actually an organised ‘Dark Side’, any more than there was a single unified force called ‘Humanity’. 

“I guess I’m just getting old,” she sighed, “Old and tired and not sure what I’m doing or why, half the time.”

“We should hit the arcades, forget our troubles for a while,” suggested Annie.

Now she was talking.


End file.
